fears

Tumblr has become my confession box; this place remains slightly more honed. But my most recent ‘yes, this deserves a frenzied Tumblr post’ moment seems to have grown and spread, an idea or a virus. The end result is what will tell the difference, I suppose, but ultimately it is this – what are the fears that are creeping on my mind, and will writing them out, sending them into the internet (so the world and the ether all at once, audience depending) change anything? Will admitting them in this space lighten the load, or simply provide more ammunition for people to doubt me, and for me to doubt myself?

Only one way to find out.

Here some things that I fear. In moderate detail.

I fear that my best writing days are behind me, that I haven’t improved my craft since I was sixteen. I have not had creative work published since I was in my first year of university, and that was only because I’d been lucky enough to have work submitted by my glorious former English/Creative Writing teacher at high school. I had chances to make the most of noteworthy names in my undergraduate courses – but I was too anxious, too depressed, too insert-synonym-for-terrified to let my classmates see my work, let alone the tutors and lecturers that we had. I passed my stage three prose course with a fairly good grade – but I’m sure it could have been an absolutely glorious grade if I had gone to more than the first lecture and workshop and then had borderline panic attacks every time I thought about going to a class taught by Witi Ihimaera.

On that note, I also fear that if I did find myself accepted into a masters programme (as I have wanted to do since the aforementioned English teacher basically introduced me to the concept of the IIML etc), I would descend into the same I’m-not-good-enough spiral, that I would take all judgements too harshly, that I just couldn’t hack it. Honestly, that sort of fear is probably part of why I decided that I should investigate publishing and editing as a career choice. So that I could think critically about my work from the perspective of the people with the power. So that I could learn what people are looking for when they work their ways through submissions. The contacts and connections that I have made since I moved to Wellington are probably helping that somewhat – I don’t feel like the total outsider to the literary world that I once did, but I still live on the fringe.

I fear that I have shot myself in the foot with pursuing ‘journalistic’ writing in various forms, especially over the past few months. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing these things, but I feel as if it jeopardises some people’s opinions of me and my work. Yes, I have written reviews, and feature type pieces, and musician interviews – but that doesn’t define me or what my goals and intentions are. My first and foremost love is still prose (and sort of poetry too, even if I won’t admit that up front terribly often). Articles are a way of getting paid to write things. And that’s still rather amazing to me.

Not everything has to do with writing, don’t worry.

I fear loneliness. Oftentimes, since I’ve moved here, it feels as though my connection to friendship is through the internet, and real life is just a place where I work and go to class. I don’t choose for it to be that way, but I’m still so stuck in my ways of the same group of friends through undergrad, and attaching myself to D’s friendship groups – and generally just using the (reasonable) excuse of being too sick (both in body and mind, thanks hindsight) to put effort into things like socialising. I’ve lost my touch, if ever I had it – and the problem is, the people whose company I tend to like most are probably those who least feel the need for another person in their life.

Related to that, I fear my own desirability – both romantically and platonically. I look at myself critically, and struggle to figure out what would draw anyone to me. This is before I even take into account the whole busted gut situation. Sometimes I worry that I’ve thrown myself too far into this book world – it is, after all, all that I’ve ever really known. Music, and words. I know that in theory there is more to me than that, but so often I struggle to come up with anything else. It’s reading, writing, publishing – or listening, playing, singing. Every gerund rooted in decisions that I made many years ago.

I have never felt ‘attractive’. I have always been the pursuer in any potential relationships (not that my backlist is terribly heavy there), I don’t have people paying attention to me in any way. When the fact that I ‘like’ someone comes up (rarely do I let that happen, but happen it has), I’m always faced with a ‘wait, really? I had no idea’. I just don’t know how to show it. I fear that this is something I just have to accept, that people don’t consider me a possibility until I put myself out there, ready to be shot down. It’s what I have come to expect. I didn’t walk away from the three years with Dom and keep my ability to trust people intact.

I fear my body, what it does and what it may not be able to do. This is where things maybe get a bit heavy. You’ve been warned. I have a chronic illness – we know that. It’s not fun, but for the most part, it’s manageable. Ish. But let’s now add to that the fact that at my age my mother had melanoma. One of my medications also makes me more susceptible to melanoma. More recently, she has had seizures and been hospitalised for them. My father, not yet 60, has had arthritis for years, has another autoimmune condition (not Crohn’s, like I do) and has also had heart issues. So I come from… imperfect stock healthwise, shall we say. All of this contributes to a fear of my health’s twists and turns. I already get IBD-related arthritic pain, at times. Bad knees are not the domain of one in their mid-twenties.

And related to all of that, I fear for my future. I was an IVF baby. I took eight years to come about. And whilst my two younger siblings then came about naturally, there was obviously something not cooperating that needed to be nudged for things to start happening. Because of the strange tag thing on my ear, Mum used to say that they mixed me up badly in the lab – now it feels a little more self-destructive to say that, since my health has deteriorated. So I fear having a genetic tendency towards problems in the future – not to mention the fact that since I have already had abdominal surgery and am guaranteed at least one more… it all adds up to make things like pregnancy that little bit more difficult. And it’s all the worse to worry about these things when you don’t really have a means to make them happen, anyway. It was one thing for me to wonder about it 6+ months ago when I was in an established relationship – not as something to have happen any time super soon, but something to be aware of.

Now that there’s nobody alongside me, it feels pointless to even wonder about these things, but still they play on my mind.

There are other things, of course – noises in the night, disasters, the usual. I am lucky, I suppose(ha), that I don’t have any crippling phobias of any kind, I can dislike spiders but not leap away from them – I’d flinch if a mouse scurried by but I wouldn’t scream.

But these things, even if they are me wrapping myself in knots, are weighing me down.

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I'm Briar – Briar Lawry, if you were wondering which particular one. Raw Library is an anagram of my name and a place for my writing – about anything, in theory, but mostly about books, the music industry and chronic illness. And sometimes coffee.